GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Lying for Fun and Politics

Hyperbole and extremism -- these are the hallmarks of the Bush
administration.

The president, in a campaign that began in August with a speech at
the American Legion national convention in Salt Lake City, has been
slinging a bit of both -- along with a whole lot of something more,
well, malodorous.

The president -- along with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- wants us to believe that anarchy in
Iraq, the insanity in Israel and Lebanon and the occupied
territories, Afghanistan's slide back into war and nearly everything
else that is happening in the Middle East are linked; that the theme
is a general antipathy toward freedom; and that these conflicts have
nothing to do with legitimate grievances.

And what's worse, the president's proxies in the administration
want Americans to believe that critics of their war policies are
analogous to Nazi sympathizers.

The offensive (few words could be more apt in this case) comes at
a time when the president's approval ratings are in the 30% range and
a majority of Americans have expressed doubts about the war.

Rather than confront the criticism, rather than engaging it
directly and participating in a public dialogue on national-security
matters, the president has done what this president has always done:
spin the issue, hoping to recast it to limit electoral damage.

There are two months left before the November mid-term election.
Democrats are on the cusp (if the analysts are correct) of regaining
control of at least one house of Congress, and members of the
president's party are looking to create some distance. They are
turning critical, if not of the war, then of the people running it
(in New Jersey, Republican candidate Tom Kean Jr. has called for
Rumsfeld's resignation, though he remains supportive of the war).

So the president and the administration are turning up the
rhetoric.

Rumsfeld, as Frank Rich pointed out in the New York Times, "outdid
himself."

"In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he
likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who 'ridiculed or
ignored' the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and tried to appease
Hitler," he wrote. "Such Americans, he said, suffer from a 'moral or
intellectual confusion' and fail to recognize the 'new type of
fascism' represented by terrorists."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice likened war opponents to those
supported slavery, while others in the administration offered similar
analogies.

While the president stayed away from the "appeaser" line, he did
offer a series of overripe arguments and outright lies that were
designed to scare Americans away from kicking pro-war Republicans
from office.

According to Bush, the war he misled us into -- a war that was
likely unwinnable from the get-go, a war that has only exacerbated
tensions and destroyed our credibility around the globe, a war that
we should not be fighting -- is a necessary part of our battle
against al Qaeda.

He wants us to believe that the insurgents and militias in Iraq
that are targeting American troops and doing battle against each
other are actually on the same side, that Hezbollah's missiles are
not a political response to what they believe is Israeli aggression,
that Hamas is not reacting to occupation, that all of these disparate
groups are out to destroy our Constitution and the freedoms it
protects.

(This is not tacit support for Hezbollah, the insurgents or
militias in Iraq or any of those groups. Their methods are brutal and
inhuman, their aims questionable and their leaders dangerous. That I
have to state this explicitly, however, is an indication of how
degraded our public discourse has become.)

The president wants us to believe -- echoing the Vietnam-era
rationalization that the village could only be saved by destroying it
-- that the very same freedoms that are allegedly under attack by our
Islamo-fascist enemies can only be protected by metaphorically
burning our Constitution and allowing people like Dick Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld to dance on the ashes. We must, the president seems
to be saying, "destroy our Constitution to save it."

Much of this is a political dance designed to retain one-party
control in Washington. But it's also a byproduct of our electing
extremists to high office, of allowing a group of men and women so
committed to their narrow vision of the world that they will reshape
the world to fit their conception of it.

In about a month, we can change all that.

Hank Kalet is a poet and newspaper editor in central New
Jersey. Email grassroots@pacpub.com. His blog, Channel Surfing, can
be found at www.kaletblog.com.